I'm the co-founder and partner of Lux Digital in New York, and the author of "Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking" (Berrett-Koehler, 2010). I'm a consultant to key media and advocacy organizations, and my clients have included The Ford Foundation, The Daily Beast/Newsweek, and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown. I'm a social media advice contributor for NPR’s flagship news program, “All Things Considered.” I specialize in social media, am a leading expert in women and technology, and am a frequent guest on CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more.

Can Anything Save Us From Flaming And Trolling On The Internet?

A psychologist at the University of Texas at Austintold Scientific American that “these days, online comments are ‘extraordinarily aggressive, without resolving anything.’” And a study of forcing users to employ their real names doesn’t decrease the amount of bad behavior they perform that much, either. Is there no hope for the end of Internet trolling and flaming?

My first reaction to reading the UT professor’s comments was, “Did this guy ever read Usenet in the 1990s?” Disruptive behavior on the Internet is nothing new. In fact, it extends well beyond the Internet, and throughout history– just have a look at the Wikipedia entry for flaming. Could even Saturday Night Live’s infamous “Jane, you ignorant slut” sketches be considered part of the flaming canon?

It’s commonly thought that anonymity contributes a great deal to how badly people behave with one another online, but the study cited above shows us that people with real names don’t behave that much better. Having human faces appear next to our comments and posts, however, seems to aid a more socially acceptable set of interactions. Kevin Marks, the VP of Cloud Services at Salesforce and longtime Internet thinker, pointed this out:

Indeed, what you see are the faces of people you know with the notes they wrote next to them. This taps into deep mental structures that we all have to look for faces and associate the information we receive with people we decide to trust, through what we feel about them.

Anecdotally, using trust systems and resisting bad behavior online seem to be much more affected by our relationships to one another rather than purely just about our real identities. I’ve seen that on social networks where people have existing ties, even loose ones, they’re much less likely to jump to conclusions and flame the bazookey out of someone that they care about and/or with whom they empathize. We start to respect the rules of socializing in the offline world much more when we’re equipped with the empathetic tools our brains need.

Because our brains do need those tools– we all know that lack of body language or vocal tone make it hard to discern another’s intentions. But neuroscience shows us that our nervous system takes that lack of information and knocks us down to our reptilian brains when we’re interacting in some cases online:

Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say. …

And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send” before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.” We flame.

Let me share a cautionary tale about displaying negative karma – it’s about the Sim’s Mafia. The Sims Online was a multiplayer version of the popular Sims games by Electronic Arts and Maxis in which the user controlled an animated character in a virtual world with houses, furniture, games, virtual currency (called Simoleans), rental property, and social activities. … One of the features that supported user socialization in the game was the ability to declare that another user was a trusted friend. The feature involved a graphical display that showed the faces of users who had declared you trustworthy. …

It didn’t take long for a group calling itself the Sims Mafia to figure out how to use this mechanic to shake down new users when they arrived in the game. The dialog would go something like this: “Hi! I see from your hub that you’re new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house.” “What are you talking about?” “I’m a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply.

The authors also found in other cases that when services hid users’ karma, but made it known that karma was a factor in how their interaction on the service played out, users were on their best behavior. Not knowing for sure if you’re going to heaven or not is a big behavior influencer, evidently. And when services displayed users’ karma, they abused the crap out of each other.

Can anything save us from flaming and “extraordinarily aggressive comments” on the Internet? An attempt at establishing a relationship with the other person might help; “stop, drop and think” before responding might be another. We need digital literacy programs for all ages of Internet participants, because, as the UT professor notes, “ The back-and-forth negotiation that goes on in having a conversation with someone you don’t agree with is a skill.” And we’re clearly not doing a very good job at making these skills fundamental to our social behavior– yet.

Howard Rheingold, digital culture expert extraordinaire, has started to set us up for better social citizenry online with his latest book, Net Smart. He outlines five essential literacies that will help us overcome this essentially awkward teenage moment in our collective online social development: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or “crap detection”), and network smarts. There’s a solid foundation there for getting us all to behave better.

Lest you think the destiny of our interactions with one another are all doom-and-gloom, I’ll leave you with one final thought: When we share with one another on social networks, studies show that oxytocin is released in our brains– the same chemical that’s associated with affection and cuddling. Now, go share some tweets and Facebook comments with your online networks, and feel the love.

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As you alluded to, flaming and trolling isn’t new; it’s not going to go away.

Personally, the only problem I truly see with it is that thin-skinned individuals surrender their reactions when they get offended by it. One can only be offended by giving one’s consent. An Off Topic area of a forum I participate in has its share of trolls, and it’s not unique that way. But I simply ignore the ones that tend to troll and go about my business.

Instead of regulating others, people need to get in the habit of reigning in their willingness to surrender their personal responsibility. If we each kept ourselves to ourselves, this wouldn’t even be a topic worth discussing.

Some of the socialization shortcuts that our brains try to help us with – quickly evaluating good from bad, likes from dislikes, etc. – can also leave us a bit blind, lazy, and narrow in our thinking and experiences if we don’t push out beyond those comfortable boundries. “Willful Blindness” is a book that deals with this shortcutting and shows how we benefit from it and how we are sometimes hurt by it when it causes us not to see things correctly or perceive things as we should by including information that is sometimes excluded by the shortcut filtering process. Shortcuts are fast and efficient but don’t always provide all we need to know.

How do I evaluate the correctness or incorrectness of my thinking if I don’t let that thinking be challenged and refined – respectfully and thoughtfully. I’ve changed the way I see things many times in life, in big and small ways, based on information I didn’t have or experiences and perceptions of others that were not part of my life and knowledge. Sometimes I’ve retained and even sharpened my thinking on a matter as well and that is beneficial to me as well because, having explored the view deeply, I understand more fully why I think the way I do and how it benefits my life.

You said: “Anecdotally, using trust systems and resisting bad behavior online seem to be much more affected by our relationships to one another rather than purely just about our real identities.” I find this to be absolutely true – people group; we need individuality and community in a proper balance to be healthy. Grouping too can be healthy or unhealthy and have a number of blind spots. It can lead to very beneficial and rewarding relationships and it can also lead us to accept and excuse behavior we shouldn’t within our own groups especially in absence of strong group pressure and social stigma to bring the offender in line. It leads us to identify “our group” by the best attributes and actions of those among us and “their group” by the worst attributes and actions of its members.

Great article! Found your insight into the roll anonymity has in Internet trolling very interesting. We are campaigning to create a behavioural change amongst Internet users. I couldn’t agree more with you and think education is imperative to counter anti-social behaviour online. You should take a look at our blog inatrolltrollworld.wordpress.com JT